The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise Virtual Assistant

5 greatest considerations behind implementing and putting your enterprise virtual assistant to work.

While you’re considering whether to build a virtual assistant for your enterprise, you have most probably come across all kinds of pitches about how you can perform magic with your virtual assistant — make so much more money, save so much time, or improve morale by so much. However, there are many nuances that underpin a successful enterprise-ready virtual assistant.

Fit it into your business strategy

The most important point to consider is what your business strategy is — what do you differentiate on, and how are you currently doing that? A Virtual Assistant is a part of your bigger engagement and communication strategy, and needs to be put into that perspective, rather than a standalone toy project, or as a huge endeavor all on its own.

Don’t buy into the misinformation

Many virtual assistant purveyors may try to tell you that it will be easy and straightforward to launch a virtual assistant for your enterprise that will do whatever you want it to. In reality, there is no one-size-fits-all enterprise virtual assistant, and it needs to be carefully tailored to your goals and objectives. Another crucially important aspect is the natural language processing capabilities of your enterprise virtual assistant provider, and dialog modeling expertise, which require time and effort, and cannot be rushed too much when you want to create a useful virtual assistant that will actually improve the lives of your users.

You need the right internal systems

Your internal systems, such as API integration, security, inventory management, scheduling, payments and other related infrastructure need to be able to support and align with the functionalities that you want to imbue into your enterprise virtual assistant. To help customers with their support queries, for example, you may need to integrate not just your helpdesk, but also operational systems to resolve these automatically — or it just becomes a virtual assistant that won’t do much for the customer, or free your staff up for any higher-value-added tasks at all.

Figure out early where it fits in your enterprise

Will your virtual assistant be externally-facing and serve customers or partners, or sit within your internal systems to help your employees be more productive? Both are great use cases for bots, and require different specifications and even bot platforms. For example, you may choose Facebook Messenger as the right virtual assistant platform for your enterprise to help customers find the right products for themselves; or you may select Slack as the medium to help your company’s employee transparency by providing a digest of the most important things that happened in all the channels for that day. Knowing what you want your bot to do, based on your priorities, will ensure a focused conversation and search for the right enterprise virtual assistant builders.

Give your virtual assistants meaningful KPIs

As with other platforms, you should expect more out of your enterprise virtual assistant. Based on your business requirements, find out what exact KPIs your virtual assistant will drive, and take performance measures every 1–3 months, with varying lenses of evaluation. You should care about the quantitative metrics like bot engagement, but more so, think about how to run content analyses and text analytics. Qualitative measures like reasons behind improvements in CSAT or employee satisfaction will help to fine tune your hypotheses about the raisons d’être of the bot, and factor into future optimizations and improvements.

If you like more of our concrete advice and hands-on guide on how to get started building your enterprise virtual assistant, reach out to us today to learn more about our experiences with building great virtual assistants together with our wonderful clients.

Happy virtual assistant building!